Before You Hire a Radio Station Consultant

By Jason Kidd
Programmer, Talent, President/CEO

The first thirty days of a consulting engagement are supposed to be about your sound. More often they are about your filing. I spend them working out what is actually in the music library, which automation box is the real one, and who in the building is allowed to say yes to anything. None of that is consulting. You pay consulting rates for it anyway, because somebody has to do it before the real work can start.

That is avoidable, and the stations that avoid it get noticeably more out of the same money. So here is the work to finish before anyone starts, in the order it matters, what you will be asked for in week one, and the honest version of when you should not be hiring at all.

What should a station fix before hiring a radio station consultant?

Every item on that list is work a station can do itself, for free, in the weeks between deciding to hire somebody and actually starting. The reason it does not get done is that it is nobody's job. The program director is on the air, the engineer is chasing a transmitter, and the owner assumes the consultant will sort it out. The consultant does sort it out, at the rate you agreed on, and that is the most expensive filing clerk you will ever employ.

There is a second cost that is harder to see. First impressions formed during a cleanup phase are formed from a mess, and some of them stick. If the library looks like nobody has curated it in four years, the recommendation will be shaped by that, even when the real cause is that one person left and the categories were never maintained after.

None of this is about looking good. It is about where the first invoice goes. A station that hands over clean materials in week one gets a strategic conversation in week two. A station that does not gets the same conversation in week six, having paid for both.

Why does the music library come first?

The problems are always the same five. Duplicate titles sitting in the library two or three times under slightly different spellings, so a song you think plays twice a day plays five times. Songs living in two categories at once, which quietly breaks every rotation calculation built on top of them. Missing or inherited coding, where tempo, era and energy fields were filled in by whoever imported the file and never reviewed since. Files ripped at wildly different levels, so the processing has to fight the library instead of the other way round. And titles that were pulled from the air years ago and left active in the system, waiting to surprise somebody at two in the morning.

Any one of those is survivable. Together they mean your scheduling software is producing a mathematically perfect log from inaccurate inputs, and nobody can tell by looking at it. This is why a consultant asks for a library export before almost anything else. It shows in twenty minutes what listening to the station for a week only hints at.

Cleaning it is tedious and genuinely does not require outside help. Sort by title and find the duplicates. Sort by category and look for anything that appears twice. Pull a report of everything that has not played in six months and decide, song by song, whether it belongs. Spot check the coding on fifty titles at random, and if more than a handful are wrong, assume the whole field is unreliable. A program director with a few afternoons can do all of it, and then the first real conversation is about what the station should sound like. I went through how rotations get rebuilt on top of a clean library in the build order for a radio format clock, and every step in it assumes the library underneath is accurate.

What has to be true about your automation and your logs?

Half migrated is the common state and the worst one. A station buys a new automation system, moves the music over, and then stalls because the voice track workflow or the satellite switching never got rebuilt. Six months later there are two machines in the rack, two sets of audio folders, and two people who each believe theirs is the live one. The on air result is usually fine, because the staff have memorized the workaround. The result for anyone arriving from outside is a week of untangling.

The log is the other half. Pull yesterday's log and compare it against what actually went to air, and do it on an ordinary day rather than one you prepared for. Spots in the wrong break, elements that fired late, a stopset that ran long because something was dropped in by hand: these are normal and they are also the exact things a consultant will flag as structural problems when they are actually one person covering a gap. Knowing which is which before the engagement starts saves you from paying someone to diagnose a habit.

If the migration genuinely cannot be finished before you start, say so on the first call rather than letting it be discovered. It changes the sequence of the work, and one who finds out in week three has to redo the plan.

What will a consultant ask for in the first week?

The audio is the part stations get wrong, every time. What arrives is a scoped aircheck of the morning show on a good day, with the music removed and the best breaks assembled. That tape tells me how your morning host sounds when they know they are being recorded, which is not information. What I need is three hours off the air, unedited, on a Tuesday, including the music, the spots, the imaging and the silence. That is what your listeners actually receive, and it is the only version where the station's real texture shows up.

A year of ratings trend tells you whether a problem is recent, seasonal or permanent, and those three lead to completely different work. If you do not subscribe to a ratings service, say so. Plenty of stations do not, and the engagement adapts by leaning harder on the audio and the revenue picture.

The imaging cut list is the quietest item and often the most revealing. A station whose cut list has not changed in three years has a sound its audience stopped noticing a while ago, whatever the quality of the individual cuts. If you want to know what a consultant will conclude about your radio imaging before they tell you, go look at the dates on the files.

On the roster, list everyone who touches the air, including part timers, weekend board operators and anybody voice tracking from outside the building. Those names get left off because they feel peripheral, and they are often exactly where the inconsistency in your sound is coming from. The craft side of that is in how to voice track a shift properly, and it is usually a coaching fix rather than a staffing one.

Do you have to settle the staffing question before you start?

This is the one that costs the most and gets mentioned the least. An owner decides in January that the afternoon host is not working out, hires a consultant in February without saying so, and in April the plan that was built around that host has to be rewritten. Nobody did anything dishonest. The information simply never made it into the room, usually because the owner had not said it out loud yet.

Say it out loud. A consultant who knows a change is coming will plan the sequence differently, often doing the structural work first and holding the talent coaching until the roster settles. A consultant who does not know will invest weeks in developing someone who is on their way out, and the station pays for both the development and the rework.

The reverse case needs saying too. Do not hire a consultant to provide cover for a decision you have already made about a person. It is unfair to the employee, it is unfair to the consultant, and it corrupts everything else in the engagement, because from the moment the staff suspect that is what is happening, nobody tells you the truth about anything again.

What does the owner have to decide before the first call?

These sound like the same goal and they are not. A station built for ratings and a station built for billing diverge within a month, because the first protects the audience experience and the second protects inventory. Both are legitimate, and a lot of successful stations are deliberately built for billing with their eyes open. The problem is only ever the station that wants both and will not say which wins when they collide, because that decision then gets made by default, differently, every week.

The sale case changes everything and owners rarely volunteer it. If the plan is to sell in eighteen months, the work is about trend and presentation, and anything that disrupts the numbers in the short term is the wrong move even when it is right for the station long term. I would rather know on day one than find out at the valuation.

Community standing is the fourth and the most often unsaid. Some owners want the station to matter in town more than they want another ratings point, which is a defensible goal with a real programming shape to it. It just needs saying, because it argues against several things a consultant would otherwise recommend by default.

How much should you budget, and for how long?

The shortest engagement that can prove anything runs through two full measurement periods. The first shows the disruption, because every structural change costs something in the short term while the audience adjusts. The second shows whether the change worked. Stopping between them is the most expensive thing a station can do, and it happens constantly, because month three is when the invoices feel real and the numbers have not moved yet.

The second number is production, and it is genuinely separate. If the plan calls for a rebuilt imaging package, new radio jingles or regular voice tracking coverage, those are produced things with their own costs, and a consultant who folds them silently into a retainer is doing you no favors. Ask for the two numbers separately so you can sequence them. Plenty of stations do the structural work first and hold the production spend for the following quarter.

I will not put a price in a blog post, because the honest answer depends on the size of the station, the state of what you have and how much of the work your own staff can carry. What I will say is that the cheapest engagement is almost never the one with the lowest monthly number. It is the one where the prep was done, so the money bought programming from the first week instead of the sixth.

When should you not hire a radio station consultant at all?

The newly hired program director is the one I turn down most often. A station hires a PD, gives them eight weeks, decides the sound has not moved fast enough, and calls a consultant. Eight weeks is not a fair test of anybody, and bringing in outside direction on top of a new PD guarantees one of two outcomes: the PD is undermined and leaves, or the PD and the consultant disagree and the staff learn to wait out both of them. Give a new program director two ratings periods and the authority to use them. If the sound still has not moved, the conversation is worth having, and it will be a better one because there will be something to assess.

The authority problem is the quietest of the four. Some stations have a decision maker on paper who cannot actually act, because real approval sits with a group owner, a board or an absent partner. The engagement then becomes a series of recommendations that go into a queue and never come back out. Before you sign anything, find out who can say yes to a format adjustment, a schedule change and a production spend, and whether that person will be on the calls.

The money version of this test is separate, and I have written about it along with what the engagement looks like once it starts, in what a radio consultant actually does in month one. The short form is that consulting improves how a station performs and does not create money the business model is not producing. A station in genuine financial distress needs a different conversation, and an honest consultant will say so rather than take the retainer.

If you are not sure which of these describes you, that is a normal place to be, and it is a five minute phone call rather than a project. Send us three hours of ordinary air audio and tell us what you want the station to be. We will tell you plainly whether you are ready, what to fix first, and whether our radio consulting services are the right answer at all. Get a free demo and we will listen to your actual station before anybody talks about a retainer.